Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Thus he was an outsider while the Bay of Pigs operation was plotted. Lansdale thought it was “suicidal” to launch a D-day–style landing with fewer than fifteen hundred exiles; he favored starting with “a small guerrilla force . . . and gradually build[ing] up its bona fides.” He subsequently became involved in efforts to overthrow Castro as chief of operations for an interagency operation code-named Mongoose. But he found his superiors, and in particular Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, impatient with his hopes of creating a revolutionary organization within Cuba that would win “the warm, understanding, and sympathetic approval of the people.” The administration “wanted fast action,” meaning commando raids and plots to assassinate Castro. Among the “nutty schemes” that were considered, as one author aptly termed them, was a plan to airdrop toilet paper printed with pictures of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev to humiliate those Communist bosses. While few such proposals were actually implemented, their later exposure caused significant embarrassment to all concerned, including Lansdale, who would be hauled out of retirement to testify before the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. As with North Vietnam, so with Cuba: Lansdale’s attempts to destabilize Communist dictatorships ended in ignominious failure.72

  In spite of Kennedy’s support for his efforts, Lansdale was also stymied in his attempts to get the U.S. armed forces to wholeheartedly embrace counterinsurgency warfare. In 1962 the president urged the armed forces to prepare for a “type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat.”73 To meet this challenge, he set up a Special Group, Counterinsurgency, whose members included his own brother. But the group was chaired by General Maxwell Taylor, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to Vietnam whose own outlook was relentlessly conventional. He favored preparing for limited wars between regular armies.74 Thus the armed forces paid the president lip service but nothing more. When JFK visited Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1961, the Army Special Forces proudly paraded in their new green berets, which the president had authorized them to wear over the opposition of the regular army, which despised any deviation from the norm. (The same color beret was worn by the British commandos with whom the first U.S. Army Rangers had trained in 1942.) Resplendent in their headgear, they staged a “real Cecil B. De Mille spectacular” for the president, one soldier recalled, which included a trooper in a “rocket contraption” flying across a lake and landing in front of the president.75 The army, told to include guerrilla warfare in its curriculum, even instructed its typists “how to make typewriters explode” and its bakers “how to make apple pies with hand grenades in them.”76

  Such gimmicks may have been related, however tenuously, to carrying out a guerrilla war, but they had nothing to do with countering a guerrilla war, which was to be the army’s main mission in the 1960s. As Lansdale noted, Kennedy’s prodding produced “a lot of activity,” but most of it lacked “the quality desired.”77 Senior officers thought that conventional training, doctrine, and organization would be sufficient for this task. Their outlook was summed up by General George Decker, army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who claimed, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”78

  Similar sentiments had no doubt occurred to many other soldiers over the centuries before they were disabused of their illusions by rebels ranging from the ancient Maccabees to the nineteenth-century Spanish guerrilleros and the twentieth-century Irish Republicans. In fact, while guerrilla warfare on a tactical level utilizes many of the same skills as light infantry operations, the strategy of war among the people is entirely different from a clash between two uniformed forces on empty sand, soil, seas, or skies. Low-intensity conflict necessitates an emphasis on policing and controlling the population. The application of indiscriminate firepower can be counterproductive if it results in unnecessary civilian casualties and thereby drives more civilians into the rebels’ arms. Thus a war against guerrillas typically requires a degree of restraint that is far from the norm in conventional conflicts.

  THAT WAS A lesson the U.S. armed forces were to learn at high cost in Vietnam—for neither the first nor the last time. The situation had deteriorated markedly since Lansdale’s departure in large part because of North Vietnam’s decision in 1960 to form the National Liberation Front to wage war in the south. On a brief visit in 1961 Lansdale was shocked to find that the Communists had “been able to infiltrate the most productive area of South Vietnam and to gain control of nearly all of it.”79 He was even more dismayed to see “Vietnamese artillery firing on villages”—that was “something you don’t do in a guerrilla war. . . . You never make war against your own people.”80

  Diem, for his part, was becoming more isolated in his presidential palace, “screened in,” as Lansdale put it, “by his palace guard.” Following Lansdale’s departure Diem had no trusted interlocutor who could urge him to make democratic reforms. Instead he fell under the sway of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, “a truly Machiavellian character,” in the words of a South Vietnamese official.81 He propagated a crackpot, quasi-Marxist doctrine known as “personalism” and employed heavy-handed tactics to repress dissent, leading to a fatal confrontation with Buddhist monks.

  “If the next American official to talk with President Diem,” Lansdale wrote in 1961, “would have the good sense to see him as a human being who has been through a lot of hell for years—and not as an opponent to be beaten to his knees—we would start regaining our influence with him in a healthy way. . . . If we don’t like the influence of Brother Nhu,” he recommended, “then let’s move someone of ours in close.”82 But no American representative after his own departure was able to establish that kind of rapport with the prickly president. Similar woes would plague future generations of American officials who had to deal with José Napoleón Duarte in El Salvador, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, and Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. It is, indeed, a common issue in any counterinsurgency where an outside power is supporting but not controlling an ostensibly sovereign ally. It was not a problem that confronted the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, or other imperialists fighting in their own colonies, but in those cases the lack of an independent indigenous government presented its own problems in winning popular support.

  In South Vietnam the most promising counterinsurgency initiative enacted post-Lansdale was the Strategic Hamlets program set up at the urging of Sir Robert Thompson, the “suave” head of the British Advisory Mission83 and, like Lansdale, one of the few prominent counterinsurgents with an air force background. (He had served as RAF liaison to the Chindits.) This population-resettlement and village-security plan was modeled on Malaya’s New Villages and Israel’s kibbutzim,84 but under the misguided direction of Ngo Dinh Nhu the program expanded too fast. As Thompson noted, “It took over three years to establish 500 defended Chinese villages in Malaya. In under two years in Vietnam over 8,000 strategic hamlets were created, the majority of them in the first nine months of 1963.”85 That was far too many for the fledgling South Vietnamese armed forces to safeguard, allowing the enemy to infiltrate the new hamlets. After Diem’s death in an American-backed coup, which came less than a month before Kennedy’s own assassination, the program fell out of official favor, although efforts to safeguard hamlets continued.

  With the Saigon government plunged into a period of uncertainty and the Vietcong growing in strength, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, faced a thankless choice: either employ more military might or risk letting an ally fall. In 1965, in response to ostensible North Vietnamese attacks on two U.S. destroyers on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a gradually escalating series of bombing raids on the north that would be punctuated by pauses meant to spur negotiations. The first American ground troops were dispatched to safeguard air bases, but soon they took on an active combat role. By the end of 1965 there were 184,000 American troops in the south, a figure that was to steadily increase
until topping out at 540,000 in 1969.86 North Vietnam responded by sending its own regulars south to fight alongside the Vietcong. That, in turn, led to a further deterioration of the security situation—not to mention the domestic situation in the United States, where the unpopularity of the war and the draft helped spark protests and riots on college campuses. By relying primarily on conscripts, the Johnson administration was ignoring lessons learned by, among others, the Roman, Chinese, British, and French empires, all of which had found that pacification operations far from home, seldom popular and invariably costly and long-lasting, were generally better left to professional soldiers who volunteered for this unglamorous duty rather than to unenthusiastic citizen-soldiers whose dispatch was certain to spark social unrest back home.

  Nor was this the only lesson of guerrilla warfare past that went unlearned by the American forces. General William Childs Westmoreland, head of U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, was a courtly southerner who, if nothing else, looked the part of a general with his thick salt-and-pepper hair, bushy eyebrows, and granite features. A veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he was well schooled in conventional operations, but nothing in his background or education prepared him to face an enemy that did not stand and fight in the open like the Wehrmacht or the Korean People’s Army. In 1964, when Westmoreland was first being considered for command in Vietnam, a brigadier general warned that “it would be a grave mistake to appoint him”—“He is spit and polish. . . . This is a counterinsurgency war, and he would have no idea how to deal with it.”87 That prediction turned out to be tragically on target.

  On the basis of his limited experience, Westmoreland had a one-word solution to the insurgency: “Firepower.”88 U.S. aircraft would drop more bombs during the Vietnam War than during World War II, with most falling on South Vietnamese territory.89 Predictably, however, the liberal employment of firepower, combined with the use of noisy aircraft, helicopters, trucks, and tanks, signaled every American attack well in advance and usually allowed the enemy to slip away. Communist troops occasionally would slug it out with American formations—for example, in the famous 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley that was the subject of the book and movie We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young. But seldom would North Vietnamese or Vietcong units allow themselves to be trapped and annihilated. All that the massive expenditure of firepower achieved was to create lots of casualties and lots of refugees, thereby alienating the population of the south. “We really blew a lot of civilians away,” a U.S. officer later admitted.90

  Like Kitchener in the Boer War, Westmoreland was indifferent to civilian suffering—he measured the progress of the campaign by compiling highly suspect “body counts,” and it was all too easy to count any dead peasant as a Vietcong fighter. Yet once American or South Vietnamese troops left an area, the Vietcong usually returned to reassert control. American forces were so busy chasing Communist formations around the sparsely populated highlands that they neglected to secure the country’s sixteen million people, 90 percent of whom lived in the Mekong Delta and in the narrow coastal plain.91

  Westmoreland hoped to cut off the insurgents by interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads running through North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia into South Vietnam. But he never succeeded, because the austere guerrillas did not require many truckloads of supplies to keep going. Moreover they had another supply line running straight from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was more important as an infiltration route for reinforcements (by 1966 over fifty thousand fighters a year were going south), but individuals hidden in the jungle were notoriously hard to hit from the air.92

  There was, in fairness, more to the American war effort than conventional operations. There were also some promising counterinsurgency programs conducted in cooperation with the South Vietnamese. These included the Combined Action Program, which sent squads of marines to live in Vietnamese villages and protect them in cooperation with the Popular Forces militia; Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, which sent CIA and Special Forces personnel to mobilize ethnic minorities, the Montagnards, much as the French had done before them; Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols, which sent small hunter-killer teams made up of American and South Vietnamese Special Forces to gather intelligence and ambush enemy forces; and the Phoenix Program, which sent American and South Vietnamese intelligence operatives to root out Vietcong cadres. These programs produced more enemy kills and fewer casualties among American forces and Vietnamese civilians than more-conventional operations. One Vietcong leader later said, “We never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks”—a feature of Phoenix—“created tremendous difficulties for us.”93

  But these programs were not quick enough or decisive enough for the U.S. military hierarchy, which was searching for what Lansdale derided as a “short-cut” or “magical formula.”94 Counterinsurgency came to be referred to as “the other war,” and it was little more than a minor adjunct to the lumbering search-and-destroy missions that consumed 95 percent of American resources.95 This was a major difference between the unsuccessful U.S. war effort in Vietnam and the more successful efforts of the British in Malaya and of the Filipinos in the Huk Rebellion. Those conflicts saw the employment of many counterinsurgency programs superficially similar to those utilized in South Vietnam, but they were the main effort—not a sideshow. In South Vietnam, mindlessly destructive “search and destroy” missions undid many of the gains won by more-focused counterinsurgency campaigns.

  Notwithstanding steady increases in the forces at his disposal, Westmoreland never achieved his cherished objective—to reach a “crossover point” when he was killing more Communists than Hanoi could replace. Even as American commanders eagerly claimed credit for often exaggerated “body counts,” the number of enemy fighters in the south steadily climbed. According to official American military estimates, there were 134,000 Communist regulars and guerrillas in the south at the end of 1965 and 280,000 by 1967. The CIA believed the actual figures were much higher—over 500,000 by 1968.96

  Communist forces suffered staggering casualties—after the war, Hanoi admitted losing 1.1 million soldiers97—but it made little difference. North Vietnam was a dictatorship impervious to public opinion. The American public was more casualty conscious and began to turn against the war when it became apparent that little progress was being made in return for the sacrifice of so many American lives. Long before the final toll had reached 58,000 dead, millions of Americans had taken to the streets to protest the war’s continuation, making it America’s most divisive conflict since the Civil War. Hanoi deliberately played on public opinion in the United States, tailoring its propaganda to encourage antiwar activists, some of whom, most famously Jane Fonda in 1972, actually visited the north. The Hanoi line had it that the Vietcong were independent of the north and that Ho Chi Minh and other northern leaders were not really Communists.98 These myths were believed by many in the West. The people of North Vietnam, by contrast, were cut off from anti-Communist appeals by government censorship.

  Years later, after he had left Vietnam in ignominious defeat, Westmoreland and many of his military colleagues tried to shift the blame for their ill-chosen tactics to their political masters, especially President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. But while Johnson did micromanage the bombing of North Vietnam for fear of drawing into the war Hanoi’s allies, China and the Soviet Union, he took a hands-off attitude toward operations in the south. “Within South Vietnam, the U.S. commander had very wide latitude in deciding how to fight the war,” writes historian Lewis Sorley. “That was true for Westmoreland, and equally true for his eventual successor.” “Westy,” in short, had no one but himself to blame for his decision, eerily similar to that of earlier French commanders in Indochina, to fight a “war of attrition” that played directly to the Communists’ strengths.99

  THE CONVENTIONAL—and futile—contour of the war effort was already well estab
lished by the time Lansdale arrived for his second tour of duty in South Vietnam in August 1965. His bureaucratic enemies had forced his retirement from the air force at the end of 1963, only a few months after his promotion to major general, but Vice President Hubert Humphrey remained a fan and thought Lansdale could still be useful. The CIA station chief in Saigon “damn near dropped his martini” when he heard that this “blunt and unorthodox” interloper had been appointed as a civilian to head the newly created Saigon Liaison Office, reporting directly to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.100

  Lansdale reassembled many of the old gang from the 1950s along with some newcomers—including the former Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg, who would achieve infamy in 1971 as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the war. At his two-story villa on Cong Ly Street, Lansdale and his aides hosted a nonstop stream of Vietnamese visitors with whom they chatted over ginseng wine into the wee hours and sang folks songs.

  By now Lansdale was a “living legend” who was expected by the press to perform “miracles.”101 But there was no native leader comparable in stature to Magsaysay or Diem for him to work with. Just as Lansdale had expected, Diem’s downfall, which had been engineered by one of Lansdale’s associates, the CIA officer Lucien Conein, had led to the rise of one uniformed dictator after another, each lacking legitimacy.